Another thing that I have found to be powerfully enriching: learning to grow and identify plants, in particular plants that are native to your area.
For one thing, being able to point to a plant and say "Hey, that's [plant], it's the host plant for this cool moth..." means you have knowledge that like 1% of the people around you actually have, but that practically everyone is interested in and will remember. This is knowledge that is hard to obtain via reading and googling and very easy to gain through experience, so it's ridiculously easy to teach other people once you know how to identify a plant in front of you.
It also gives you a real sense of being part of the world around you. You start to get excited when you see plants you're familiar with. They're like friends. It's SO rewarding to see your plantings flourish and attract insects and birds and butterflies.
I've written about it but it's really helped me break through my feelings of despair and hopelessness. "In a year...in five years...in ten years..." you can picture the tree you planted, and understand that there is a real future for you
And not only does growing plants connect you to a real future that you can help build, cultivating tough native trees and wildflowers is so, so much easier than growing almost anything else.
The concept of houseplants being the easiest level of Growing Plants is bullshit. I have absolutely zero intuitive sense of the type of conditions my tropical houseplant WANTS to be in. I don't know how my bathroom compares to a jungle, and I don't know what that jungle Is Like.
But when I'm growing a plant that I can see growing wild around me in a container on my porch, I just Know things about this plant's preferred conditions. "Wow, it's unusually hot and dry right now. Maybe my plant would like to be moved to a little shade and to have some water?" If its 96 degrees out and hasn't rained a drop in two weeks, I know that the plant is probably turning yellow because it doesn't have enough water, not because it has too much. Because, ya know, I Live Here Too
A lot of valuable native species are basically weeds. They'll grow given the barest chance.
It's also the same as cooking in that giving a neighbor a plant is a great connection-building gesture, in particular with retired old people that are probably desperately lonely and may have a lot to teach you
I've learned a ton from starting a volunteer job at a nature center close by and I've met a lot of cool people. Plant identification apps are a good place to start and they're not always accurate but they give you something to google.
